The Language Of Gratitude
by Illusive Writings
Summary: With time languages evolved. Humanity developed ways to communicate with their groups, yet often required other means of communication with other groups. Like a sniper deprived of her words found herself in need to communicate with a soldier that doesn't talk much.
1. Chapter 1

_Unbetaed and I'm pretty sure my editing skills suck so there are some mistakes here and there, forgive me for that. It's my first try at writing fanfictions about MGS, I had to force this out because I had a huge writer's block for the other fanfics I'm writing and it was either writing this or stop writing for good until the block was gone._

 _I doubt this story will be updated on regular basis but I'll try to push a chapter each month._

 _Hope you'll like this, and for the rest... well, I'll be just stoked if this story gets a review or two. And if they're positive, I'm going to open the good wine._

* * *

Everything started out with the very basics of human relationships.

He hadn't killed her.

Despite her repeated attempt at killing him, Big Boss had spared her life. He had her at his mercy, exhausted and wounded from their fight at the Aabe Shifap Ruins, and yet he hadn't pulled the trigger.

His men hadn't been happy to see her, but with a deadly glare he had put them back in their ranks when they were about to shoot her, under Miller's command. After that, he had personally escorted her in a special cell on the medical platform, made sure she had room, water and air, then he had headed out. To take a shower, perhaps, she had no idea, but he was covered in dirt and mud, she doubted he'd head out to another mission in those conditions.

She didn't see him for two weeks after she arrived on Mother Base, and those weeks were filled with interrogations, an extensive array of medical exams, more interrogations and more tests. She complied, letting the medical staff poke and prod her any way they pleased. Though diffident, the doctors that examinated her were kind enough to not make her feel like a guinea pig and it was a nice diversion from the constant insults that her guards threw at her.

Not that the insults bothered her, but they were becoming a little stale and boring. Once the novelty of a sniper assassin that could phase through the bars of her cells at will wore off, even inventive insults started to be lacking and the amusement she could get from them disappeared.

There was music at least, all day long, it helped keeping her some company, and yet after two months, she was bored to death. Even if she could have escaped her cell with a snap of her fingers, she had decided to be as cooperative as she could be. She remained in her cell, day and night, unless someone took her out for more tests.

Along with insults, spits and deadly glares from her guards, boredom became her companion.

Until the other blond guy, the Russian dressed as a cowboy from the movies everyone called Ocelot, dragged Big Boss down to her cell and explained how her physiology worked. He praised her abilities and kept speaking about how good she could be on the battlefield and such.

Big Boss, though he went by the name of Snake or simply Boss, seemed impressed but reluctant when Ocelot proposed him to take her on the battlefield. Not that she could blame him, she had tried to kill him twice, technically was still part of XOF and answered to Cypher and she was their prisoner, but she saw something, a glint in his blue eye. A flick of light that instilled a drop of hope that one day or another she'd manage to complete her mission and kill Big Boss.

But mostly it offered her a chance to escape boredom.

It took some more time but finally, Snake decided she could be useful on the field and took her with him in Africa.

And for her, things radically changed.

The moment she set foot on the chopper, the pilot, codename Pequod, turned towards her and pulled the darkened visor on his helmet and greeted her with a bright smile. "Quiet right?" he asked, extending his hand to her. Taken aback by how friendly the pilot seemed to be, she awkwardly shook it. "Welcome on board. Now, relax and enjoy the flight, it's going to take a long while to reach Africa." He turned towards the command console again and pushed some buttons so the helicopter rose from the helipad. "Gaining altitude!" He announced.

A thick silence fell in the cabin, filled only by the constant rumble of the rotors. Quiet felt a little odd, sitting on the bench doing nothing for no one knows how long was weird for her. Her fingers itched for activity, after so long trapped in the brig she needed some action. Commute time wasn't exactly what she wanted in that moment.

She dared to look at her right, on the larger bench where Snake sat. He was fiddling around with his iDroid, a cutting edge piece of tech she had never seen but that apparently allowed him to do a bunch of stuff, both on the field and Mother Base.

Before deployment, Ocelot had given her something similar, a lot less complicated and that could communicate univocally with Snake's iDroid. Given her refusal to speak, it would be a good way to inform him of what she had found as she scouted the area ahead. She had gotten familiar with it soon after Ocelot had given it to her, and found it a decent way to communicate with him. They had the radio too, if she ever needed to inform him of the presence of an enemy, the iDroid was great for that.

After a while though, she found herself fiddling with her gloves just to have something to do.

Suddenly, in her far field of view, a battered copy of 1984 made its appearance, along with a red prosthetic hand. Big Boss was handing her the book, taken from God knows where on the helicopter.

She warily took the book from him and inspected it. The cover was frayed, the edges were rough and the paper was thick and yellowed. That book had seen better days, but the spine still held the pages together.

"Deployment can be boring," he stated, sitting back on his bench and focusing on the matters he needed to take care of through the iDroid.

Those were first words he had spoken ever since they had set foot on the helicopter. It almost felt eerie to hear him talk, his low gravelly voice had a inflection that to her sounded like a sense of defeat that was uncharacteristic for a man like Big Boss. Or at least from the image her colleagues at XOF had painted of him. They were told her he was the greatest soldier that had ever walked on Earth, back in the day, but what she had found lacked that aura of a legend that seemed to irradiate from Big Boss.

At the hospital… before the other man had burned her to a crisp, he had looked like a lost man, someone that didn't even know who he was. But after nine years in a coma, she had thought it was quite normal. Now, after months, despite having bulked up and gotten back into shape, his alert blue eye still showed some of that desperation she had seen as she had tried to kill him. The shadow of sadness you'd see in the eyes of a lost puppy that had been separated from his mother.

Big Boss looked unhappy.

She took a deep, useless breath and opened the book. She had read it already, but she needed a distraction, otherwise she'd keep brooding over the man sitting beside her and how he had betrayed all her expectations.

Hours later, she had nearly finished her reading when Pequod announced they had still an hour before arrival. As if spring loaded, Snake startled up right in his seat and grabbed his iDroid. He opened the holographic map.

"Quiet, come here."

She raised her eyes from the book and looked at the map Snake was showing her. "Here. The mission is to destroy the Walker Gears the PF has acquired. They occupied an abandoned village and hold it as a stronghold so they have the higher ground." He pointed out the LZ, about a kilometer south of the village. "We will land here and I'll do some recon from a distance. Now, can you do some scouting ahead of me? You're way faster than me and you can reach the village sooner. I've studied the area and I saw a couple of good sniping points, here and here. You're free to choose the one that suits you best, or pick another you like more. You alright with that?"

She never heard him speak for so long, form so many sentences all in one single time. What marvelled her, was the fact that he was actually asking her if she found the strategy right or if she didn't agree with what he had planned.

Quiet was used to obey orders and stop. Receive instructions, carry on the objective, and stop. No one had ever asked her what she thought about those instructions.

The plan seemed solid enough, the distance between the LZ and the objective gave her enough time to scout ahead while he reached the place. And the sniping points he had highlighted seemed adapt to her tactical necessities.

She sighed, or mimicked a sigh with her burnt lungs, as she nodded.

"Good. Now…" Snake put the device down and pulled a thin black nylon bag from the wall beside him. He tugged the zip open and pulled her rifle out. "I took the liberty to perform some standard maintenance on it, cleaned and oiled it. Nice gun, you personalized it, right?" He asked as he handed her the rifle, along with ammo and a silencer, still in its cardboard box. "Nice modifications, by the way."

On a quick and cursory inspection, her beloved _friend_ looked exactly as it did when she had let go of it at the Ruins, only it was clean and not covered in dust like the last time she had seen it. She checked the slide of the bolt and it seamlessly moved, making the extraction of the shell and the loading of another bullet faster. The scope was perfectly aligned and the trigger required just the right strength applied to it to fire, not excessively resistant but not too weak too, so the chance of it shooting at the slightest pressure applied to it.

She gave him another stiff nod, acknowledging his work.

When she had finished checking and loading the gun Pequod started the descent, and Snake moved to open the door of the helicopter. He sat on the floor, legs dangling outside and only a short belt keeping him from falling off, in case he slipped. Quiet watched him as he took in the landscape and the setting sun, his eye fixed on the horizon. He seemed so concentrated, but also so relaxed, at ease even if he knew perfectly well that the mission he was about to being was extremely dangerous.

The PF that had taken residence in the African village was known to have access to top of the line armaments and weapons, the intel file on her own i-Droid mentioned heavy machineguns and anti-aircraft cannons. The job was extremely dangerous, no matter which way you thought about it.

And yet, he seemed at peace, even if bullets were ready to fly around him, meant for his head.

Suddenly she felt a surge of admiration for Snake.

 _Maybe I won't kill you right away._ She thought. _I'll let you do this mission. Then we'll see._

When the chopper had moved away from the landing zone, Snake turned towards her. "Look, I don't like killing people if I can avoid it, odd as it sounds. As you can see, I'm armed with non-lethal weapons. I asked the R&D guys to prepare a non lethal rifle for you too, based on the same specs of this one, but they weren't ready yet. The one I have isn't nearly enough powerful to propel the bullet to useful distances and give it adequate stopping power, considering how far away you usually choose your sniping points. For this time, I'll ask you to shoot only if someone threatens to give the alarm. Before you kill someone that spotted me, if someone spots me…"

 _Cocky bastard…_ she thought, after that.

"...wait, give me a second to deal with it. I might be able to get behind cover or get rid of them myself. Alright?"

She gave him a curt nod.

"Great. Now, go ahead. I'll take the long route and try to sneak in the camp from the left side and do my thing."

Watching him do _his thing_ , as he had called it,was the best show in the world, even through the minuscule point of view of a scope. Gone were the slumped shoulders, the defeated look and the shadowed eye, Snake was all focus and no shit. Despite the heavy gear and boots, he moved as silent as a bird flying high in the sky, unnoticed by the guards he passed by. And he passed by a good deal of guards as he reached the objectives.

Snake slowly made his way through a less guarded side of the village, from a steep climb. On her scouting venture, she had noticed that there was a sort of corridor on that side and had signalled him through the iDroid, and he exploited the lack of security to avoid being detected. A couple of times he had preferred to be overly safe and crawled his way through a patch of high grass. That allowed him to avoid the inquisitive look of a guard that had noticed some movements in the dark.

Her rifle was trained on the back of his head, but Snake had already moved from the spot the guard was searching. No need to kill anyone.

For now.

She saw Snake planting C4 charges on the four Walker Gears less than two hours from the start of the mission.

"You know…" she heard him mutter in the radio, the first words he had spoken since they had separated, at the landing zone. "I wish I could take these away. They could be useful."

She mumbled an affirmative sound over the open microphone.

"What if I used the Fulton…" He paused for a moment, then through the scope she saw him shake his head vigorously. "No, the Fulton isn't strong enough to raise it. Too heavy."

Snake was on his way back when he stopped in his tracks, his head turned towards a tent. "Quiet…" he called. "Someone's calling for help, from that tent."

 _What the…_ she thought. _Prisoners?_

He took a peek inside one of the tent and came back in her view with an emaciated man hanging from his shoulders. He wore a blue tattered allover and seemed lifeless. "Quiet, there's a prisoner, can't leave him here, I need to extract him but the Fulton will make too much noise. Is the way clear?"

She checked and wished she could talk. She mumbled something that to her sounded like a no. But there was something she could do. Create a diversion.

There was a generator running, decently far from his position but close enough that the guards on his way would move away from him, she had seen it on her recon. If she shot it and made it stop working, all the lights in the camp would turn off, giving him more space to move around and maybe allowing him a quick dash away from the guards' field of view so he could extract the prisoner.

The only problem was that she had to shot said generator through a tent.

 _Well, let's hope no one's in there_. She thought before she pulled the trigger.

A spark a low _pop_ later, the lights went down. Only the moon and the stars lit the area, and the guards weren't ready for it.

"Good thinking," said Snake while he moved away from the area to a secluded place, away from the PF soldiers. They were mostly gathered around the downed generator, wondering what the hell had happened and trying to start it again. He exploited that distraction to attach the prisoner to the Fulton system and fire it up. The poor man shot up in the dark sky with a scream and before he knew it, the support helicopter had snatched him to safety.

"Did you see any other prisoner?" He asked.

Quiet sighed and mumbled a negative reply. There were a number of tents and run down houses though, good places to keep a prisoner well hidden from enemy eyes. She had carefully looked for people _outside_ those places, not inside.

 _Good for the next time._

"I'm taking a look around, keep your eyes open. And about the generator… good thinking, it was a great idea."

He found another prisoner in a run down house, proceeded to knock down a couple of guards so he'd have it easier to move around with the poor guy on his shoulders and, once at a reasonable distance from the encampment, extracted him via Fulton.

With that done, he reached her position on a hill and lay beside her. "And now, some fireworks."

Snake pushed the button of the detonators and four C4 charges went off at the same time. Four short lived balls of fire lit the dark village and scared to death the CFA soldiers. Their screams could be heard even from their position, so far away from them.

In the dim light of the moon, Quiest saw a smirk from on his face, like the stub of a smile. His eye sparkled. He looked happy.

It didn't last much though, the half smile disappeared from his face as quick as it had come and yet it seemed like a great feat for him.

He dug his fingers in a pouch and extracted a metallic cylinder that looked like a cigar. "You mind?"

She shook her head and he lit it, sort of, using his iDroid. Now that was something she didn't really understand, but she didn't care much. And she had to admit that the herbal scent it let out, a mix of mint and something that reminded her of good quality absinthe she had once when she was in France, wasn't half bad at all.

She wondered if Snake smoked even real cigars and not only fake ones.

"Let's go back to the LZ," he mumbled, cigar bobbling from his lips as he spoke. "Pequod will be here shortly."

With once last glance and the now panicking camp behind them, they headed back to the rendezvous point with the helicopter. Snake had both his hands planted in his pockets and kept his eyes pointed to the ground. Around them, the savannah was calm and silent, except for the far noises coming from the airport and some animal in the far distance.

The warm breeze around them brought different scents with it, from dust to gasoline, in a peculiar mix that Quiet had never experienced despite her short but intense career as a XOF operative. The tangy smell of a swamp, dung of various animals, woodsmoke and something spicy in the back, like the smell of someone cooking dinner over an open fire, somewhere.

Snake kicked a rock out of his way. "We did good, don't you think?"

Quiet looked up at him and shrugged her shoulders. _Kinda._

"I usually work alone, I brought DD with me on occasion but I have to say, the thought he might get hurt makes me want to lock him on the animal conservation platform so I'm sure he'll be safe and sound."

She smiled at the sudden display of humanity from the legendary soldier. She had seen DD and their interactions during the long flight from Afghanistan to Mother Base two months ago, while she was cloaked and even later, after she had blown the brains of that pilot out. The dog hung around the cockpit of the helicopter happily, sometimes looking for a scratch behind the ears and sometimes for a treat. She thought he was cute, with the eyepatch that matched his master's.

"This was an easy one though. I'm not sure what will come ahead for us, so I'm going to ask you now. Do you wish to come on missions with me, or you prefer your status as prisoner?"

He was asking her if she wanted to do more missions.

That had never happened. Well, yes, it had happened before, Snake had asked her what she thought of the plan, back on the helo. Still, it caught her off guard a little.

Quiet was used to orders. She was expected to execute them with deadly precision, not to answer questions like that. Did she want to help him? No! Did she want out of the cell? Desperately.

And she had to admit that the fact he took care of extracting prisoners of war from the PF made him look less an enemy and more a possible ally. After all, XOF hadn't made a move to rescue her from the enemy hands - not that she expected them to, Plan B saw her infiltrating Mother Base and kill everyone with the parasites - and despite the insults and the not so veiled threats, Diamond Dogs had treated her with respect. Big Boss above all.

And he was asking her if she wanted to help.

Despite her better judgement, she nodded.

"Good. Unfortunately, things on Mother Base are quite…" he scratched the back of his head as if prodding the right words to describe what he meant. "They are tense about you. Sometimes I think only Ocelot and I see something human in you, a person that can turn resource even, though Ocelot had to poke me for a while to make me realize that you could be helpful. Anyway… I can't let you out of the cell, for your own protection."

She could picture her own eyebrow shooting up in a questioning look.

He seemed to take the hint and managed to amend his words right away. "I know you can handle any of them without a sweat, it's just that I don't want you to have to actually defend yourself from them. We need to keep up appearances, even if you become an asset for Diamond Dogs. They don't trust you right now, and I don't really want a riot to start. I'll try to make things more comfortable for you though. You alright with that?"

She nodded again.

"I'll have a shower curtain installed tomorrow."


	2. Chapter 2

_And I decided to go a lot AU with the story so don't expect me to follow the canon of the game. Because reasons. And because I'm the queen of AUs so… be aware that this story will soon go very AU. If it's not your thing, you're warned._

* * *

First came the shower curtain, a thick olive green plastic curtain that was quickly installed by an overly zealous technician. Then came a larger cot and a more comfortable pillow.

On the next deployment, Snake showed up at the helipad with his normal gear plus a large backpack. Once comfortably seated and with Pequod skillfully leading the chopper to Afghanistan, he opened it and pulled a bunch of books out of it.

"Let's see, Ocelot's intel team has found quite a few books. Apparently people like this Stephen King these days, here we have _The Shining_ , _Carrie_ and _The Dark Tower_. Big enough to entertain us for a while."

He placed the three tomes on the floor of the chopper, then fished for more stuff. "A favourite of mine, _Fahrenheit 451_ , _Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheeps_ and last but not the least, another colossal doorstopper, _War And Peace._ Pick your read."

The choices were a bit staggering. Quiet knew of Stephen King, though she had never read anything from him. A bit awkward, she picked _The Shining_ from the pile and gave it a cursory look. It certainly was long, thick enough to last at least a few hours worth of travel. The description seemed intriguing, even if she wasn't much of a horror fan, but as long as she didn't have to listen to the the noise of the engine for three hours, she could even read a commented edition of the Holy Bible for all she cared.

She looked at him and saw he had picked _The Dark Tower_ , as it was the only book he had left out when he had packed again the tomes.

By the time Mother Base had disappeared behind the horizon, they were both immersed in their readings. From time to time Quiet dared to look at him. Snake seemed pretty drawn in the book in his hands, his blue eye darting along the lines quickly. He was a speedreader, definitely.

As time passed and pages were turned, the sniper found herself more and more comfortable in the cramped space of the helicopter and she unconsciously shifted on her seat. She turned to press her back against the co-pilot seat and stretched her legs on the small bench, boots hanging from the edge. Pequod had told her that the deployment time to Afghanistan was even longer than the time they needed to reach Africa, better get comfy so she wouldn't have strange aches and pains on the battlefield.

Snake too had made himself as comfortable as he could, one leg crossing over the opposite thigh and pressing his back to the metal wall of the cabin. His book rested on his legs while he lazily turned the pages. The fact that he wasn't trying to wring out words from her exploiting the casual conversation a book could bring on relieved her. After she had deployed with him a couple of weeks earlier, guards patrolling the platform close to her cell had started trying to make her talk. A barrage of questions, from mundane and innocent to lewd and rude, that had often made her throw a nicely placed middle finger up in the air towards the soldiers.

It turned out that Snake had provided her books just to let her survive the boredom of deployment, a pastime activity he was already used to, considering how fast he read. He wasn't trying to make her talk. It wasn't a trick. It was an offer of peace, one of those commodities he had spoke of after their first mission together.

She wished she could thank him with words, but she'd have to rely on her skills in battle to show her gratitude for those little things.

Speaking of battles, hours later Pequod announced they were about half an hour from the landing zone, yet Snake hadn't briefed her on the mission. When they went to Africa he had explained his plan pretty early during their trip, this time, nothing.

Only when the pilot spoke, he put down his book and took the iDroid. "Quiet?" He called. "Briefing?"

Smiling briefly, she put a piece of scrap paper in between the pages and set the book, before sliding closer to him and the map he was showing.

"We don't exactly have a mission today, nothing major at least. We're going to _do rounds_ , move around the area of operation and… well, we'll do some damage to the Soviet army in order to undermine them. Nothing major, I'm talking about stealing materials, capable soldiers, weapons and vehicles," he explained. "We're going to remain in hostile territory for three, four days maybe, as long as we can resist or the Soviets discover the trick and counterattack."

It sounded dangerous. He had highlighted some guardposts and outposts, all on the same road, that led to the Soviet base camp. She really hoped he didn't intend to infiltrate that place, it was a fortress and she didn't know if she could provide enough cover, even with her special enhanced abilities.

"I've done this before. Guardposts aren't a huge problem, there are usually four or five guards there. Six tops, in my experience. Outposts of course are way more crowded, but there are more places to hide. I'll try to steal a vehicle early on, so I can follow you faster and not let you rot in boredom every time you finish scouting a new outpost."

Quiet smiled, remembering how long it had taken him to reach the abandoned village he was going to infiltrate two weeks prior, on foot and all alone.

"Support unit is ready to help us in case we're in trouble, but I've made sure to deploy troops on the other side of Afghanistan in the past month, to trick the Soviets into thinking we have interests in that territory. Ocelot's unit found enough evidence that showed the trick worked, and security is more lass in the southeast part of Afghanistan, and that most of the resources have been moved here, to keep them safe. And easier for us to steal them. The officers that had the great idea are going to have a nasty couple of days when we'll be over with our raid."

The sniper knew all too well what he was aiming at. Depleting their resources, or at least nick them, to slow them down. He had no interest in single handedly destroy the Soviet army in Afghanistan, their presence after all allowed Diamond Dogs to thrive with the different contracts they took in the area. But making things easier wasn't such a bad idea, if the wanted to keep the DD personnel alive and able to be deployed in combat zones. And replenishing the newly expanded Mother Base with fresh, capable soldiers in the midst of it would only do good to the morale and, of course, the earnings of the mercenary company.

The plan wasn't bad, but it relied a lot on a certain degree of improvisation, something she had learned that could make things either really easy or an absolute nightmare. One misstep and they would both be killed or worse captured. But Snake seemed quite sure of his abilities, also he had already done something similar in the past. Still wary but more inclined to trust him, she nodded in agreement with his exposition of the plan. Not that she could do much to voice her disagreement.

"Right. Now, I promised I would get you a real sniper rifle with tranquilizing darts, and the R&D guys delivered. Actually, I devoted a small team to take care of weaponry made from your own design, you have five people at your disposal to work on any weapon you may need."

She knew her eyes sparkled at the idea, and beneath his thick beard she saw him smile when ne noticed. He pulled a deep blue nylon bag from the space between the wall and his seat and opened it, revealing what looked a lot like her customized Renov ICKX, but the stock and the chassis were painted blue. The caliber looked the same, but the chamber was a little larger to allow the casing of the tranq darts to fit properly. It looked like a well made gun, she looked forward to test it.

What surprised her was the second weapon he handed her. Her own personal pistol, the one he had taken from her after he had defeated her at the Ruins. She grabbed the handle and looked up at him. His eye was trained on her, probably studying her reactions. "Kaz keeps telling me I shouldn't give it back to you. He's convinced you're going to kill me the first time I turn my back on you," he explained. "But I decided to trust you. And you need a sidearm."

The weapon was in pristine condition. He had cleaned it personally, she was pretty sure of it, with the same care he had used to clean her old rifle.

"There are mags in this bag." He pulled a backpack into view from beneath his seat. "Six for the pistol, I have no idea how many for the rifle, guys at the support unit took care of them. You should be covered for at least two fairly awful infiltrations attempts. Support can drop more, if you need them. Ready?"

She nodded and pulled the bag closer. _This is going to be fun._ She thought.

Not thirty minutes later, Pequod left them at the LZ near Spugmay Keep, the first stop over of their _tour_.

As soon as they set foot on solid ground though, Snake hurried off behind a fallen boulder, excusing himself. Quiet turned towards him, curious about that snappy conduct, but couldn't help but giggle when she heard the distinct noise of a zipper being tugged open and a long sigh of relief from the soldier.

He must have felt the need to relieve himself for quite some time.

As she waited, she sat on a stone of the once magnificent wall and proceeded to load her rifle with a fresh mag of tranquilizer darts. The wait wasn't long though, as Snake appeared from behind his makeshift toilet wiping his fleshy hand with a disposable wet wipe. "What?" He inquired, noticing that she was probably still smiling.

She shrugged her shoulders and stood. _Nothing._

"Have you ever had to stop during a mission to pee? It's not that uncommon."

True. It wasn't uncommon and it had happened too. After all, good hydration was one of the moot points of a successful mission, because it kept the mind clear and the body working, making the soldier more efficient. One side effect was, of course, that said soldier would need to expel the liquids in excess, and during her own time with XOF, she had to take care of that in the middle of the mission, sometimes.

"How about we start our tour? There's a guardpost, half a kilometer ahead of us," he explained while wearing his tactical glove. "Want to go ahead and test that rifle?"

He didn't have to repeat it one more time. Feeling the rush of adrenaline almost numb her brain, she speeded towards said guardpost and started her recon round on it. Way before Snake could even see the outpost down the road, she had completed her recon, identified a large container of gasoline cans and spare electrical parts, tracked the three guards and found a suitable sniping point. Once she was set, she marked her finding on her iDroid to let Snake know and prepared to fire when ordered.

She had her scope trained on the neck of a Soviet soldier when Snake arrived at her sniping point and lay down prone beside her, scope in hand. "Seen anything interesting?"

Quiet looked down at him and mumbled something. _Nah._

"Mmh, seems like a poor guardpost with little to nothing that could be useful. Even the guards posted here, look at them they're sloppy soldiers, and the scanner confirms it. Oh wait a sec, there's one with the medic badge, that one could turn useful. It's the one on the observation tower. I think I'm going to Fulton him. Now, I want to see if the R&D guys did a good job with that rifle, fire at will."

The low recoil startled her, when she fired the first dart. Being gas propelled and not with gunpowder, each shot had a dampened recoil she wasn't used to. It wasn't bad though, she could catch up with it, though she didn't mind the feeling of the shot travelling down her arm and chest through her shoulder. It wasn't indispensable, but all the other rifles she had ever used had a different feeling to them, she just needed to get used to this one.

Through her scope, she saw the small dart, shaped like a bullet, stick to the neck of the soldier. He fell like a soggy cloth half a second later. The narcotic inside that dart was extremely powerful, she really didn't want to be on the other end of that thing.

She shot twice in the span of the next ten seconds and two more soldiers fell. The iDroids chirped in unison: _Guardpost Captured._

Quiet caught a brief smile on Snake's face, while he stood up. He brushed off some dust from his clothes and started heading down the guardpost. "It shouldn't take long, you're free to go ahead and take a good look at the village, if you want."

She pointed at her position and then gestured to the road.

"You want to watch out for incoming patrols?" He asked, and she nodded in reply. "Alright."

It was barely visible, but see the sudden deflation of his chest as he let out a sigh of relief. Someone would be watching his back and he felt safer that way.

That was a huge display of trust in her, despite her previous attempts at killing him. But sometimes she doubted he remembered the first time. His hospital room was dark, he was scared to death and things happened really, really fast.

She sighed and mindlessly hummed a tune she had heard so long before she couldn't remember if she had indeed heard it or if she had come up with it on her own. The only thing she knew was that it helped her relax and steady her hand, allowing her a more precise aim.

It took him less than ten minutes to gather what he deemed useful for Mother Base and Fulton them so the support helicopter could grab them and bring them back. Then they repeated the same procedure with Da Shago Kallai. That outpost took a little longer, not only because there was much more stuff to gather and people to Fulton, but also because the village had much tighter security.

"You know…" he started while he took care of a tranquilized soldier and moved him out of view. "The first time I entered this village, I had woken up from the coma. Like… two weeks before? I have absolutely no idea how I managed to pull the whole infiltration through. Not to mention the Skulls…"

She cringed when he mentioned the Skulls. Despite technically being akin to the members of the Skull Unit, having received a less radical parasite treatment, she despised them. They gave her the creeps, full blown nightmares were born from knowing that they existed and that they were once people.

 _Fuck it…_ She thought, focusing back on Snake and his movements.

"Quiet, shoot that guy," he ordered then. Said guy was a soldier on patrol not too far from him. She waited a moment for him to be out of his comrades' view then shot him. He barely felt the sting then fell right in Snake's arms, without a sound.

"Damn he's heavy…" he muttered as he dragged the tranquilized soldier inside a dilapidated building.

He cleaned the place. Between his own gun, choke holds and her, the eight soldiers were all taking naps in less than fifteen minutes. He spent the next half hour gathering every resource he found and fultoning it for the Support Team to pick up. Methodic and thorough, like a surgeon.

Damn that man was a continuous surprise. She had to admit that the first impression she had, the let down of all her expectation back in the helicopter heading to Africa, was wrong. She had been so wrong. In two hours he had infiltrated a guardpost and an outpost, cleaned them both and stole their resources.

Wow. That was everything she could think about.

And then he was nice to her. Well, they weren't best friends or anything, but he acted around her and treated her like she was a human being. She wasn't exactly sure she wanted to kill him before and forth with her mission, and after the last couple of weeks, she was even more inclined to let him be and forget the whole mission. In two weeks, Big Boss had treated her way better than any XOF officer she had served under in the past seven years.

She was still reloading her rifle, musing over the happenings of the last few days, when he arrived right beneath the ridge she had occupied as a sniping point driving a dust-covered jeep. "Tired yet?" he inquired, crossing his arms over the steering wheel. "Because I'd love to take a look at the Lamar Khaate Palace before the sun sets."

He was smiling.

Not a twitch of his lips, not a half smile or a chuckle, a full blown smile.

And that smile didn't look half bad on him!

Mentally slapping herself, Quiet stood, throwing her rifle over her shoulder as well as the bag with her ammo, before she jumped down beside the car. After that, she shook her head to answer him.

"Good. Jump in then, I know you can just go faster on foot, but I don't mind the company."

Shaking her head, wondering how much company she could as she didn't speak, but nevertheless she hopped in the passenger seat. After all, driving instead of running through the desert, was a much better option. For once, she could just enjoy the ride.


	3. Chapter 3

The drive through the long strip of desert was totally uneventful and, for once in her lifetime, relaxing. The soviet jeep was battered and smelled of gasoline and cheap vodka, but Snake knew how to drive. He wasn't afraid to go fast, even on unpaved roads, but his hand was steady on the wheel and he had absolute control on the rather wobbly vehicle.

She slumped a little bit on the seat, cradling the rifle close to her chest in case she needed to act fast, but there were no patrols in sight. Snake's plan to divert the soviets' attention to another area was proving to work very well, as they drove north west to the Lamar Khaate Palace, one of the strongholds the soviets had claimed as their outposts.

"Are you familiar with the place?" he asked, as they crossed a sandy slope and came into view with their destination.

She nodded.

"Good. There are no foolproof ways to get inside that place, last time I had to crawl all the way to the barracks and extract the target so fast I can barely remember what the hell happened, but it was night time. If you look at the map you should see that there are rocky ridges on the left side of the ruins, I was thinking to use that makeshift pathway to sneak in the back and… well, do what I do."

She checked the map on her iDroid. The plan wasn't bad, according to the topography of the area there were some good sniping points she could exploit to follow him and cover his infiltration in case things went wrong. Yet, it was a dangerous place nevertheless, full of nooks, dark corners, crumbling walls and caving floors. She had been there a couple of times, and she didn't like the place much. Yet, there were reports from vanguard scouts that the soviets had moved a lot of resources there so they had to at least take a look if there was anything useful.

And she could go ahead and do some scouting before he arrived, so they'd both have a better idea of what to expect.

As if he had read his mind, Snake slowed down to a halt. "Quiet, feel free to go ahead if you want. I'll bring the ammo bag once you're set at the sniping point, alright?"

With another nod, she cloaked and sprinted towards the place.

She wasn't expecting massive surveillance, but there were enough people to cause some trouble. There were indeed some containers of resources, mostly gasoline and other types of fuel and what looked like a container of rations and other provisions, enough to feed the outpost for a month or more. She chuckled, thinking how bad soviet rations were and how disgusting they tasted, but in war, you eat what you can get.

In her case, sunlight and water.

 _I wonder if I can still eat and drink normally._ She thought, inspecting the third floor of the now wrecked building for marksmen or other soldiers. _Doctors said my lungs got burned, but never spoke of the rest. Oh well…_

It wasn't the right place to think about food. Maybe one day she'd try, but that wasn't the right moment.

Having learned from her past mistakes, she double checked inside the barracks and tents for possible prisoners, but this time, she found none. Better, less stuff to think about.

As soon as she was done, she climbed on a rocky ridge slightly offside the building and reported her findings to Snake through the iDroid, then waited. He appeared about ten minutes later and sat beside her. "Now, this is what I call fun," he spoke softly, looking at the outpost.

 _Fun?_ She thought.

"Yeah, fun. I mean… open space, few guards, lots of spots to hide behind and ambush people… in my line of work, this is awesome! In yours though…"

 _Not so much_. She completed his sentence.

"Now, seen something interesting?"

It was almost becoming a catchphrase between them. Did he trust her judgement on what was interesting that much?

"Mhh, gasoline tanks, a shipment of firewood, rations… they can be useful. The men though…" He carefully inspected each soldier with his scope. Quiet still had to understand how that thing, that looked like a standard issue binocular scope, could actually determine how good a soldier would fare on the battlefield or anywhere else. "There are a couple of good people down there, I might extract them," he stated standing up. "And no, the scope doesn't exactly tell me how good a soldier is, it's just powerful enough that I can read the badges and medals on his uniform. And I'm kind of good at judging people."

She barely stifled a sudden burst of hilarity at his last comment. As if he had read her thoughts, Snake had answered a question that had been going through her mind for a while.

 _If you're so good at judging people what the hell am I doing here?_ She asked herself as he climbed down the ledge and, keeping his profile as low as possible so the enemy wouldn't spot him.

It was then that she spotted a sniper climbing up a precarious ladder, just ahead of her. She quickly notify him through the iDroid and she saw him stop dead behind a rock in the corner of her vision.

"Sniper?" he asked via radio. Quiet replied with a short affirmative sound in the open mic and waited for his orders. Were it for her, she'd shoot him as soon as he took position, just to avoid the bother of keeping out of a sniper's cone of vision. "Shoot him."

She took a quick breath, knowing perfectly well that it meant less than nothing to her burnt lungs, held it and aimed. A split second after she had pulled the trigger, the tiny narcotic dart stuck in the sniper's neck and he fell on the dusty roof, asleep like a baby.

"Listen…" Snake said when he started walking again. "Why don't you have some fun and put some people down for a nap?" he proposed. "What do you think?"

She only wished he could have seen her face as she gleefully proceeded to put every soviet soldier down for said nap. Once she had got accustomed to the low recoil that had put her off the thing a while ago, she found that characteristic actually useful because her arm wouldn't get so sore.

As she planted a second dart in the neck of a really big guy for good measure, she recalled that time she had to eliminate a column of vehicles from a distance using an anti materiel rifle that probably weighed more than herself and her equipment combined. The recoil of that monstrous hunk of steel was strong enough to bruise her shoulder.

The tranquilizer rifle she was using now was way better. And lighter, way more suitable for her new abilities and fast ways of movement.

A couple of minutes after the iDroid had happily chirped its message _Outpost Captured_ , Snake called her. "Come down here."

Quiet found him as he tied a soldier to a pole. "Down there," he waved at the general direction of the barracks. "There's something you may like."

The _something she may like_ was a fully functioning shower. She turned towards him as if to ask permission and he waved at the barracks again, while he checked the ligatures around a soldier's wrists. "Go, Quiet. You've been out in the sun all day. I know you need water."

The water was lukewarm, because of the metal tank exposed to the bright sun of the desert, but at least, it was water. He was right, she had been standing in the sun for hours, not to mention that she had her last _drink_ of water way before they had departed from Mother Base, hours earlier. She let the parasites drink their fill, feeling energy zap through her as the tiny beings metabolized the liquid into nutrients.

After the more than welcome break, Quiet wore her boots and walked out of the barracks, running her fingers through her let down hair to loose the kinks that had formed through the dark strands. Snake was waiting for her just outside, sitting on a cardboard box in a shaded area, eating a sandwich. "Feel better?" he mumbled as he munched. She nodded. "Good. Excellent work, by the way." Then he looked at his watch, strapped to his bionic arm, taking another bite of his snack. "Mhh, we have time for another sortie before the sun goes down. I've called the Support Team and they should arrive to pick up any minute now to pick things up. Feel up for another ambush?"

Before she could reply, a soviet soldier woke up and, seeing them, started babbling about in Russian. They both looked at the guy, tied to one of the poles that held a tarp above one of the machineguns with a generous dose of duct tape, and couldn't help but laugh as the interpreter translated his terrified rant via radio.

The comedic interlude didn't last long as Snake took his own tranq gun from its holster and deftly shot him in the neck. The soldier turned off like a toy without batteries.

"He'll have a rough wake up call when he realizes he's not in Afghanistan anymore," he explained. "Come on, let's go back to the jeep." He stood and patted the crumbs from his shemag. "Or you prefer to go ahead?" She nodded. "Mhh, alright. See you at the guardpost then."

As soon as he finished speaking, she sprinted off to the selected location.

She took a moment to go through everything that had happened the day that was now ending and realized that she was having fun. A lot of fun, actually. First, Big Boss had given her the means to keep herself entertained during deployment in the forms of huge, doorstopping books. And she had to admit that The Shining was a good one, for what she had read up to that moment. Then, everything that had happened, the two outposts and guardposts they had raided… the new rifle that fit her perfectly not to mention the fact that Snake had been kind enough to allow her to shower.

Each day she spent on Mother Base, each hour she worked with whom she thought was the enemy, the less she actually wanted to fulfill her mission and kill him and his Diamond Dogs.

Despite the best training and mental conditioning cutting edge technology could offer, XOF hadn't managed to turn her into the perfect killer after all. She still had doubts, from time to time, about killing people. Most of all people that treated her fairly and not like an expendable pawn in a larger game like her commanding officers at XOF.

Halfway to her destination, she stopped on top of a rock and inspected the area around her.

 _Holy fuck!_ She thought when she saw the huge wall of sand coming right in their direction.

"Quiet!" Snake's voice blared the earpiece of her radio. "Come down here, there's a sandstorm incoming, we need to find a place to hide!"

 _This is bad_ she told herself as she ran down the gorge where Snake was driving, just a couple of miles behind her. When she reached him, she jumped in the passenger seat and uncloaked.

When she appeared, Snake jolted on his seat. "Goddamit Quiet!" he screamed. "Don't do that! I'm not that young anymore, my heart isn't as strong as it was!" he reprimanded her.

She grunted, not even caring. On her face she knew there was written something like _what do we do now?_ Like a neon sign.

"I don't know, wait a sec." He pushed a button on his radio. "Ocelot, where do we go?"

"Up ahead," she heard the Russian's voice in her own earpiece too, then the noise of countless paper sheets being moved around. Maps probably. "Yes, up ahead, three miles. There's an abandoned building, probably the old shack of a shepherd. It isn't big but it should be solid to keep you safe. If you rush, the storm won't catch you."

Snake pushed hard on the gas pedal and the keep accelerated on the uneven road. The jeep creaked with each bump they struck, and Quiet found herself holding tight to the seat in order to remain inside the vehicle. Snake drove like he had the four horsemen of the apocalypse behind his ass and if she had to be honest, she'd drive just the same way, knowing there was a sandstorm approaching.

They finally reached the building Ocelot had spoke of, Snake parked the jeep behind it so it wouldn't be visible from the road and they proceeded to force open the door. In the dim light of the setting sun, clouded by the approaching wall of whirlwinding sand, they saw that the inside of the small shack contained nothing more than a couple of chairs, a table, the metallic structure of a bed, completely stripped of everything except for a ratty mattress, and a couple of oil lanterns in serious need of some repair.

"Well, it's not the Savoy…" he spoke. "But at least we won't wash sands off our clothes and hairs for months."

She watched him as he fiddled with one of the oil lamps until he managed to make it work. With finally some light to see, he set a backpack and a large gas canister he must have pilfered from the soviets to the floor, then proceeded to strip of his weapons and arrange them in a neat row against a wall. He took off the tactical vest and hung it to the back of a chair and stretched. "Make yourself comfortable, I fear we'll have to stay here for a while."

A bit awkward at the prospect of being locked in a tiny room with him for an unknown amount of time, Quiet tried to make herself comfortable. She took the rifle off her shoulder and set it upright against the wall, then took off her own tactical equipment and stretched herself. She didn't bring much with herself these days, but after a day carrying a large caliber gun, four smoke grenades, a bag of ammo and a rifle, even her trained shoulders felt a little strained.

 _And now?_ She thought, sitting on one of the run down chairs.

Just to have something to do, she took the rifle, unloaded the magazine and wiped some of the dirt that had stuck to it, but without a proper cleaning kit, there wasn't much she could do to pass the time.

Snake appeared to be in the same predicament. Now stripped of everything but his fatigues and boots, she sat on the chair opposite of hers, arms crossed and legs stretched out. On his face, she could read the boredom quickly creep out. After all the fun he had, being stuck in an abandoned shepherd during a sandstorm with a XOF operative wasn't probably the best way to end the day.

"Well, this sucks," he declared after a while.

She could only shrug in reply to that. _You can say that_.

"And damn it's just a huge clichè!" he chuckled. "Straight out of a movie. A bad one too!"

Quiet had the feeling he was talking about cheap pornography but managed to school her reactions and not show any sign of amusement. After all, their situation was typical of certain movies and TV shows she had seen, but most of all, it was a staple of very bad porn flicks that sometimes her male coworkers shared among them back at the headquarters.

No that she had any intention to strip for Big Boss, not more than her regular state of undress anyway. He may have been causing her some doubts about her mission, but no way in hell she wanted to have sex with him. For any reason.

She actually shuddered at the thought.

"Well, we're stuck here. Better find something to do until the storm outside wanes." He pulled the backpack closer to him and started looking through its contents. He had snaffled quite a few things from the soviets, Quiet could see canned rations, a packet of cigarettes and a cheap flip lighter, a bottle of an unidentified liquor and a frayed card deck. But he put all those items back inside and extracted a cardboard box with a blister inside it. "Ah, there they are." Then he handed the box to her.

Water purification tablets.

"I filled that canister with water, but I'm not exactly sure it's clean enough for human consumption. I'm pretty sure those should purify it, considering the picture drawn on it."

 _I thought you spoke Russian._

"You see, before this…" he pointed at the shrapnel poking from his forehead. "I could fluently speak Russian. Now I can't even remember how to order a beer. Do you perhaps speak it, we need to know how many tablets we need to purify four gallons."

Luckily enough, she spoke a little bit of Russian. Not enough to hold a full conversation about world politics, but enough to at least interpret the instructions on the back of the box. She pushed four capsules out of the blister and handed it to him.

"Great." He dropped them in the canister and shook it so the tablets could evenly dissolve. "Now we have water for me to drink and for you to… absorb?" She nodded. "I haven't even asked, do you think you can survive multiple days on the battlefield? I know what Ocelot said, about the photosynthesis or… but…"

He was struggling to find words to describe her condition. She chuckled, knowing perfectly well how difficult it was to describe, she found it very hard too, even to describe it to herself. She placed her gloved hand over his fleshy arm and gently squeezed it, as if to say _I'm alright_.

"Will you be fine?" She nodded. "So you really just need water and some sun exposure to survive?" She nodded again. "Alright then. Sorry if I prodded too much."

Quiet smiled and shrugged. _No big deal, Boss._

"You don't mind then if I eat something?"

At that question, she laughed. _Why should I?_ She asked herself, and shook her head.

No wonder he was hungry though, despite the sandwich he had while she showered. He didn't seem excessively tired, but he had skipped lunch, she thought as she watched him eat the contents of one of the small cans. By the look on his face, said contents were borderline heinous, just as she remembered from her own experience. "Twenty years and they still have to learn how to feed their soldiers…" he muttered as he chewed. "Last time I ate a soviet ration, it sucked. This one sucks and it's probably stale. I almost miss the days of eating poisonous snakes cooked over an open campfire."

She laughed again, and that made him smile too. "Really, I cook a mean barbecued snake. Thanks to the Green Berets cooking training. Got me through some nasty situations."

 _Ah, so you're a Green Beret then? Explains a lot then._

As he ate his dumplings in beef sauce, if the smell was an indicator of the contents of the can in his hands, they remained silent. Outside, the wind howled and she could hear the tiny grains of sand scraping over the crude bricks the shack was made of.

"I fear we'll have to stay here the night," he said, scraping the bottom of the can with a spoon. "Too bad, I was kind of considering the idea of storming the base camp, up north."

 _Oh no way in hell!_

"During the day, it's a hell to infiltrate. But at night? Could be fun."

She snorted, as silently as she could, and threw him a piece of crumpled paper she had found on the floor beside her chair. He caught it mid air and threw it back at her. "Oh come on, give me a break! A man can dream, right?" He took a long sip from his canteen. "Nah, I wouldn't try to infiltrate that place if not forced for a good reason."

 _I wonder if getting Dr. Emmerich out of that place was a good reason then._

She didn't know the details, but the tales about his infiltration at the soviet base camp to snatch the good engineer from the soviet hands had reached even her cell, travelling from soldier to soldier until one time one of those recaps had taken place right above her cell, and she could hear it.

What bothered her was the fact that her old boss had appeared out of nowhere to botch Snake's attempt to be all sneaky, while taking Dr. Emmerich to the landing zone to extract him.

She never liked the man, although he was her boss. She had always thought he was a freak, even more of a freak than herself. His methods were too… radical for her standards, and that meant something.

 _Good thing I don't have to work for him anymore._

Maybe.

There was still that part of her that wanted to go through with the mission and kill Big Boss. It was reduced to the back of her mind now, cornered and kept in check, but sometimes, when she observed him through the scope of her rifle, she couldn't help but think how easy it would be to just pull the trigger there and then, and his life in the most stupid way ever.

Even now, it would be so easy to get behind him and cut his throat, watch life leave his body as the blood poured over his dusty fatigues. Killed like a helpless animal, trapped in a crude building in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan.

What a stupid way to die, for the legendary soldier.

He didn't deserve it. Were it someone else, any other soldier of the Diamond Dogs or that other guy on Mother Base, the one that wanted to put a bullet through her head the moment she had set foot there, she wouldn't have a second thought about completing the mission. Snake had only shown respect for her.

Respect she thought he deserved back.

No, she would not kill him. Not after he had kept her alive and cared for her wellbeing to the extent of snatching gallons of water from the enemy only to keep her alive and well.

"Tell me something, or rather nod or shake your head to answer," he said after a while. "Do you know any card game? I found a deck and I thought we could at least try to pass the time."

As required, she nodded. She could indeed play a vast array of card games, thanks to some of her coworkers. She actually enjoyed playing cards, or other games like chess, checkers and the like. She wasn't a fan of poker though.

"Great." He pulled the table closer and put it between them, so they had a surface to place the cards. "Because one of the guys back at Mother Base taught me a new game and it's awesome, it's fun but requires a certain degree of strategic thinking. It's named after an Italian author… from the Renaissance… I think." He scratched his beard as he pulled the cards out of the box. "Machiavelli, that's it. Do you know it?"

It was one of her favorite. She was pretty sure her face had _deal me in_ written all over.

"Nice!"

They spent the next few hours playing cards. Snake was a good player, hard to read and extremely strategic when it came to placing his cards and taking loads of time during his turn to plan his sortie, while she was more of a guerrilla player, planning ahead and delivering precise strikes. Both ways were good and each of them won a number of matches, before he started yawning.

"We better catch some sleep, it's getting alte and we've been up and about for a while. Take the bed, I'll sleep on the floor."

She tried to rebut, to tell him that she could sleep on the floor and that it wouldn't be a problem, but he was adamant in his decision. He literally pushed her over to the old, worn cot and made her sit there, and wouldn't take no for an answer.

The funny thing was that the moment he set himself on the floor, his head propped up on his buttpack like a pillow, he fell asleep. Instantly, like he had a switch that had just been turned off.

In his sleep, he didn't look as worried as he looked when awake. There were creases over his forehead, caused by the constant worrying of running Mother Base and fight Cipher off their back.

He almost looked cute.

Damn, that man was a walking contradiction. A bit like herself.

Curled up on her side, waiting for sleep to overcome her, she replayed the events of that night, how much fun it had been to spend the evening playing cards with him. They hadn't spoken much, but he had told her a bit of her past missions in Soviet Union, twenty years prior. Not the details, but minor little things like what kind of food he had to eat to sustain himself, how crazy the place was and how he had met Ocelot there. He seemed to enjoy the company, as he sipped the tiniest amount of vodka he had poured in a mess tin through their games, and certainly she did enjoy having a companion for once.

Yes, Skull face could definitely go to hell.

* * *

 _I know the whole "trapped by a sandstorm" is a little bit of a clichè but... hey, I had so much fun writing them playing cards that I couldn't think of a better setting for that kind of scene._


	4. Chapter 4

_Some of you kindly made me notice that yes, I tend to make some mistakes and typos. I repeat, this story isn't betaed and I'm not a native English speaker so please, really, cut me some slack. My official beta is currently under a lot of stress because of her PhD and the other story I'm writing, I don't want to bother her with this one too, considering she doesn't even know squat about this fandom. I'll try my best to be better at editing but I can't promise much. Sometimes Italian grammar overlaps with English and random mistakes appear. Thank you for your consideration._

* * *

"Rise and shine sleepyheads, dawn is breaking."

Quiet opened one eye and saw Snake jolting awake as Ocelot's voice echoed in their earpieces via radio. "I'm awake…" he mumbled. "I'm awake!" he then repeated in clearer voice.

Knowing perfectly well that no patrol would dare a sandstorm of that magnitude, they had simply decided to skip taking turns and they both slept. Waking up like that wasn't exactly the best way to rouse.

Wiping sleep from her eyes, the sniper observed Snake while he stood and patted around the dust off his clothes. He stretched and his bones popped and cracked, then he opened the door. The bright morning light flooded the shack, much to her gratitude. With the sunlight she felt the energy coming back in her limbs.

"Got something for us?" asked Snake to Ocelot.

"Actually, I do. One of our intel teams found that there's an interesting prisoner being held in the compound just north of your position. Were you heading that way?"

Snake rubbed his eyes, slipping his fingers beneath the eyepatch. "Yes, actually. We'll check that out after breakfast."

"Do you really need to? If you go now, you may catch them off guard while they're still sleepy."

"Ocelot, I'm hungry as fuck, Quiet needs a shower or she'll wither like a plant in the middle of the desert, literally!" he spat in the radio. "Let us have breakfast then we'll extract this guy. Snake out."

 _Well, thank you for that._

"You need help?" he asked. "I can keep the water tank up so you can soak in without too much effort."

Quiet nodded and he lifted the tank above her head then poured the lukewarm liquid over her. Between the sunlight and the water, she felt energized and ready to run around Afghanistan for a week. She would have never lasted a full week without water, but heck, the burst of energy of the first drink of the day was always overwhelming.

Once she was soaked water, she stopped him and sat down on the chair she had occupied the other night to let the water adsorb through her skin and feed the parasites, while Snake had his breakfast.

 _Wonder what the Soviet put in their ration packs for breakfast._

"Let's see what we have here." He pulled a cardboard box from the backpack and opened it. It contained three cans, no labels on them though, and some flimsy plastic cutlery. "Suddenly I miss mess hall on Mother Base," he commented with a sigh.

When he opened one of the cans with a multitool he had in his pocket, she understood what he meant. The smell that came from that thing was revolting. _What the hell is that?_

"Smells like a dirty locker room after a bunch of sweaty teenagers swept by and forgot to pick up their underwear," he stated, pulling the lid all the way. From the wiff that swept by her nose, she couldn't agree more and Quiet couldn't help but giggle at his rather colorful metaphor to describe the acrid smell of what looked like barley porridge and another alien gooish substance she couldn't identify but she thought was supposed to be some kind of fruit jelly.

"If I weren't starving I'd probably leave it, but seriously, I'm hungry as fuck!" And he dove in. By the grimace printed on his face as he chewed on the gelatinous overly processed food, the taste was as awful as the smell. "Gah," he lamented when he finally swallowed the last bite. "I'd need a gallon of coffee to wash that taste down. Next time we do rounds, Support Team is in charge of rations. Procurement on site doesn't work for food. Not when the Soviets are in charge."

Quiet laughed, and she noticed a hint of a smile on his face. "At least you don't have to eat this shit. You're lucky. Ready to go?" She nodded. "Then go ahead. I'll clean up and get close with the jeep. If I remember correctly, it's a closed compound so they're probably keeping the prisoner somewhere closed. Check every nook, alright?"

She nodded and once she had gathered her equipment, she sprinted out of the shack, reveling in the sensation of the direct sunlight on her skin. Being unable to get sunburnt was a great perk. Before the treatment, she easily got the worst sunburns with little to no sun exposure and was forced to cover herself in tons and tons of sunscreen so she wouldn't reduce herself to a walking lobster with blue eyes. Now? Not a problem anymore.

She just couldn't soak up in a bath anymore, and that sucked, but hey… there were worse things.

Like being dead.

The Soviet compound appeared behind a rocky hill, ahead of her. It was a run-down squared building, more like a long wall with a large courtyard in the middle, four watch towers in the corners and two gates on the eastern and western side. Surveillance was tighter than in the places they had visited the day before, she counted thirteen men just during the first and cursory exam of the area performed from afar. She marked them all on the iDroid, then cloaked and got closer. Six more men were inside the rooms. There she found the prisoner, chained to the wall. He didn't look too good.

Once she made sure she had marked every enemy, the prisoner and why not, resources she saw, she pulled away from the compound, find a more than suitable sniping post and waited. She noticed Snake climbing on a cliff on the side of the road to get a better look at the compound.

"Seems like they want to make it harder for us," he said through the microphone. "Alright, what do you think? Snipe them all from here?"

She shook her head and his answer seemed to be a direct reply to that gesture. "No, they would spot us, one way or another. Did you see any decent point of entry?"

She did, in fact, found a breach in the perimeter. A drainage canal that had been left open, without its cover, on the western side of the squared building. She promptly marked the general area she had seen it on the iDroid so Snake could see it. "Uh, alright," he stated. "It's gonna take me a while to get there, keep your eyes open."

As she observed Snake cautiously approaching the compound, she realized she needed a better scope. Snake had provided the tranq rifle with a more than decent scope, but some locations had very bad sniping posts she could occupy, places far away from the action, and she required a better magnification to help him as much as she wanted to.

"Heck, it's hot today…" he murmured as he slid beneath a car to hide from an incoming patrol.

 _Don't tell me, I'm evaporating out here._

"I'm too old for this shit…"

Quiet chuckled. He was fun to listen, when he infiltrated. He wore a laryngophone, a microphone wrapped around his throat that could pick up even the tiniest sound he made right from his larynx, and he tended to speak a lot, or at least make short, caustic comments about his surroundings. Sometimes he was cute. He saw animals sometimes, tranquilized them and attached them to one of the Fulton balloons and had them carried back to Mother Base to a special platform built only for them.

It wouldn't be bad to see it.

Through the scope, she saw Snake drag a soldier in a bungalow and disappear. The poor guy, when questioned, was happy to talk, before being put down for a while.

"Private Maksim just confirmed that the prisoner is being kept where you saw him and they have no other place to keep him. He also said he's a weapon engineer that tried to defect to the USA. I wonder if this guy would like to join us."

 _Even if he doesn't like it, Ocelot will convince him one way or another. It worked with me._

"Now, would you mind put the guard there, in front of the gate?"

Quiet found the guy he spoke about and shot. Only to realize there was another soldier in line of sight. Through the scope, she saw the man react to the sudden fall of his comrade.

 _Fuck…_ she thought as she trained her rifle on the soldier that came to investigate.

Snake was approaching and she noticed the shocked look on his face when she dared to move the scope from the neck of the soviet. Quick as always he pulled the gun from the holster and after a brief second to take aim, he shot a tranquilizing dart at him. The small needled vial hit the man on the arm, and it took the anesthetic a bit to be effective. When the other man suddenly became sleepy and feel on the dusty ground, Snake snuck out of cover and proceeded to move the two unconscious bodies out of view.

"Careful Quiet," he murmured as he tied the two men together and gagged them with a piece of cloth he had torn from one of the men's shirt. "I have a limited amount of ammo on me at the moment, if we fuck up, we're dead."

She grunted. _Don't I know it?_

"Oh don't worry, this is nothing to worry about. Infiltrating in broad daylight is a shitty job, but we do it nice enough."

 _I just wish others on the base would stop spitting on me. Why do you think I take so many showers?_

If only he could hear her thinking.

The rest of the infiltration just went as predicted. Snake crawled in a service canal, emerged just inside the courtyard and managed to avoid every guard in the whole complex, knocked some of them out and managed to extract the prisoner in less than an hour. Despite the little mess up with the two men, things went extremely smooth. When Snake reached her sniping point with the prisoner, now visibly relieved, he lay down prone on the rock and took his own sniper rifle from his back and looked up at her. "Let's have some fun!"

Quiet smiled, shaking her head, and decided to put down her gun. _You have fun, for once_. She thought.

"What?" he asked. "You don't want to…" She shook her head. "Oh… are you alright?" A nod. "You want me to have all the fun?" Another nod. "Oh come on!" Quiet stared him down for a while, and he shrugged, looking a bit intimidated. "Alright, alright. Let's see if I'm still as good as when I got my marksman certificate."

 _So he had some sort of certification in the end. No wonder he managed to get me, he's trained._

She observed him, as he tranquilized the Soviet soldiers one by one. Their techniques were different, he was more cautious with his shot, while she tended to be more impulsive and that caused her to miss sometimes. He took more time to carefully aim at the right spot and shot only when he was sure. Putting soviet soldiers to sleep seemed like a task he took very seriously, while she tended to do it almost nonchalantly, tried to do it as quickly as she could and get the job done.

After all, she had been trained to be fast and efficient, XOF wanted things to happen quickly, so the cleaners could come in and wipe traces away from the face of the earth.

"Here, done," he stated at some point as he stood up. "Come on, let's call Pequod and head to Mother Base. I don't know you but I don't think this guy can stand the desert for too long."

"Boss, how's the prisoner?" asked Ocelot through the radio, barging in their conversation for the first time since that morning.

Snake looked at the man, who sat on a rock with his canteen in his hands, holding it for dear life.

"Thirsty, malnourished, but not too bad. If Pequod gets here soon enough, he'll be even better." The man raised his head and nodded. He clearly understood English. "And he seems pretty happy to join us."

They helped him walk back to the compound where Pequod was set to land in ten minutes or something. The man looked at her as if he had just seen a ghost, his eyes often diverted from her face to her rack, to the point she had to jab him with her fist and make him look up to her face multiple times, until Snake had enough of it.

"Look at her that way one more time and you'll be on toilet-cleaning duty for your whole life."

That was more than enough. To avoid any possible mistake or wandering eyes, he stopped looking at her, completely.

It was in that moment, while she helped him pack the few things that were worth taking with them immediately before Support Unit would come and grab everything else, that Snake didn't seem fazed by her lack of adapt clothes. He always looked at her straight in her eyes, not once she had caught him staring at her boobs like most of his men.

She wondered why. Not that she would have appreciated, but Quiet knew men, she had even lived with them for a long while, she knew how they reacted to skimpy clothes or lack of them, at least how most of them did. Snake, apparently, wasn't one of them.

Well, he was nearly fifty, born and raised in another, more serious history period, maybe he had been educated that way. Or a lifetime lived within the tight discipline of the military gave him the ability to avoid wandering eyes.

Snake looked at her like she was a person. Not an object.

It felt nice, really.

"Hey Quiet, want some water?" he asked throwing her a plastic bottle filled with ice cold water.

She grasped it and nodded, with a smile. He seemed really to care for her.

"Here, let me help you," he grumbled after he tied a soviet guard to the disabled comm antenna. He brought a second bottle of water, opened the cap and held it over her head. She slipped out of her boots and he tipped the bottle over her head. Her skin immediately sucked in the water like a withering plant and she shivered.

"You alright?" he asked. "You just shivered, is it too cold?"

She shook her head. _No, not too cold. It's actually wonderful._

"Oh, alright. Just… you want some more?"

 _Nah, just fine._ Two bottles were more than enough. Even too much, perhaps.

She was trying to comb her soggy hair when Pequod arrived and landed in the courtyard. "Hey Boss!" he blared from the loudspeaker. "Everything alright?"

Snake glanced at her, then at the prisoner and shrugged. "Just right, Pequod. Come on, let's go home."


	5. Chapter 5

Days passed quickly on Mother Base, for a change. Snake had provided her a little library that expanded every time a platoon got back from deployment, and between the books, the music and the random mission here and there, Quiet found herself almost enjoying her cell. It wasn't the grand hotel, but at least she was alone. She had little to no privacy, but hey, could be worse.

There was still the issue of the guards insulting her, but as the novelty gradually died down, at least they stopped spitting in her cell. She could always turn on the volume of the stereo up, if she felt the need to smother the insults.

Until one day, a small group of barely overage recruits off duty gathered at the rail around her cell and decided that taunting her would be a good way to pass a merry time together. She ignored them, but they persevered, gradually raising the bar of their offences and insults each time the opened their mouths. They had even brought a pen to scribble insults on the signs around the cell, the idiots.

A few had her raising an inquisitive eyebrow, some made her startle as she tried to go forth with her book, a couple hit her where it hurt most but she couldn't be bothered with showing them any type of reaction. Only one made her raise her head to scorn them, the desire to phase of the the cell and beat the shit out of them hard to keep in check, but in the end, it turned out there was no such need, as Big Boss made his appearance in the scene. His towering height projected a long shadow over the mesh ceiling of the cell, and she could recognize the sweet scent of his cigar among thousands of other scents.

The moment the recruits spotted him, they suddenly shut up, terrified. One of them got caught mid-spit and in the vain attempt to stop it, he found himself with a significant amount of thick saliva mixed with phlegm hanging from his scruffy chin.

"What's this all about?" he asked. None answered. So Snake repeated the question, again no answer, until someone's brain decided to start working again and snapped in the rigid salute position, quickly followed by the rest of the group.

"I said, what's this all about? Don't you have anything better to do than trouble her?"

He sounded calm, if a little irritated, until he noticed the scribbles on the signs. Quiet had no idea what they had written on them, but whatever it was, it pissed him off very bad. He walked up to them, one of the signs held up in his left hand and asked, again, what the hell was going on.

And again, for course, the recruits didn't reply. And he ran out of patience and damn the reprimand he gave them… she'd never want to be in their place. It only lacked a corporal punishment, like all those pushups from that movie that came out a couple of years before, that one with the cute actor…

 _Ah, damn… one time I get time off and go to the movies, I completely forget the title!_ She mused as the recruits ran away.

"And if I see more insults on the signs, I swear you're going to clean all the toilets of Mother Base until your hair is white!"

Quiet had to cover her mouth to stifle a sudden burst of laughter. She had regained some composure by the time Snake peeked from the stairs. "Up for a walk in Africa? We've got a client, some soldiers gone rogue to kill, or something like that. Ocelot wasn't specific. Wanna join or should I take DD?"

Immediately, she snuck her boots on and phased out of the cell to appear right beside him. He smiled and walked back up, where he signalled Pequod to come down with the helicopter. "This one should be easy enough. Five soldiers are being held prisoners at a mine in the north of the region, another seemingly defected and now works for the Buta tribe. We have a picture only of this one," he explained as they waited. "And I'll be honest with you, I'm not really sure I want to eliminate them. I mean, we just expanded the dormitories… we could use the help, don't you think?"

She shrugged. _As long as they don't turn out to be fucking llamas…_

"I'll be sure they stop bother you. If I catch any of them again I swear I'll throw them overboard."

His sweet, well hid inner side was growing on her. The distances he was walking to make sure she felt at least comfortable in her constant state of arrest were touching. She nodded, in thanks.

"Good. Now, tranquilizing darts for this mission. The clients wants them dead but… I'll see there, if it's worth it or not. I have already given order to the Armory guys to put your stuff in the helicopter. Along with some new books. Or you want to pick something from downstairs?"

She shook her head. New book for that deployment.

"Alright. It's going to take a while to get there, and if we're lucky, we should be back in two days. The forecasts say it's going to rain quite a lot while we're there, you should be alright. I hope you don't mind the mud though." She shook her head again. "Just perfect. Oh, here's Pequod."

The flight was long and uneventful. Snake even fell asleep, so deeply he snored.

He woke up about an hour before Pequod lowered the helicopter over the landing zone and let them down. The sun was going down behind the mountains and a very light breeze moved the tall grass around them. They had been forced to land very far from their destination, in order to avoid the increasing presence of soldiers around the area.

"Looks like I'll have to walk all the way there…" he mused as he observed the map from the iDroid. "Wish I had asked for a jeep or something…"

 _You can always steal one!_ She thought as she inspected the area around them.

With a sigh, he closed the map and put the iDroid back in his pocket. "Walking will have to do, unless I'm lucky enough to find a vehicle on the way there. Now, Quiet…" She turned towards him. "All set? No one dies unless I say so, got it?" She nodded. "I don't care what the client wants. A good soldier is a good soldier, and if we can convince them to work for us, it will be better for everyone. You think you have enough bullets?" Another nod. "Perfect. Go ahead to the village and take a good look around. And be careful where you set your feet, the scouts have reported the presence of minefields around that place."

With a quirky smile, she winked at him and speeded off to her destination.

When she saw the place, she let out a disappointed breath. _Boring…_

It was just another boring village that had been occupied by rebel forces. All the legitimate inhabitants had been driven away, forced away from their homes and their plantations of… bananas, she thought, and the usurpers had now taken residence there, destroying everything the villagers had built.

 _Assholes._

She counted sixteen guards scattered all around the area, but only half of them looked on duty. About half of them looked smashed drunk in the main hut. Nice soldiers Snake wanted to recruit. She checked her own iDroid and marked all the enemies for Snake. And the position of the landmines she had noticed. The "minefield" Snake had spoken of was actually a couple of mines placed in two narrow passages beside the main road. She even found a special mark to signal the target.

"Oh, nice! Thanks Quiet!" he said through the radio as he noticed the markings. "Sorry it took me so long. How's the situation?"

She spotted him at the entrance of the small valley that housed the village. _Boring as fuck, that's the situation._ She had learned to know his methods and ways, she had gauged his abilities in the past month they had been working together, she knew he would sneak in and out with his chosen victim and they'd simply move on to the next objective.

"Quiet, keep an open eye on these guys, the night is still young, I wouldn't want to raise the alarm so early."

And right on cue, it didn't take long for Snake to accomplish the first part of his mission. The reduced security helped him a lot, and that was left for her to do was just wait for instructions, bored out of her mind as he sneaked all the way through the village with the unconscious guy on his shoulders and exited on the other side from where he had entered.

In the end, Snake attached a Fulton balloon to the guy and let Support Unit do their job.

"Quiet, the guy said the rest of the soldiers are kept in a cave in the back of the mine, just past the main dig site. Would you mind scouting ahead while I get there? I saw a path, I bet it leads straight to the mine, it shouldn't take me long to get there."

Nodding, she mumbled an affirmative sound in the open mic and moved through the trees to get to the other side of the small hill that separated the village and the mine. When she reached the edge of the small, sparse wood, she took a moment to examine the mine from higher ground. The place was big, the diamond mine was basically a large open excavation site with muddy slopes and precariously built paths that led to the prefabs scattered all around that, in normal circumstances, would house the miners, but in this case, gave shelter to the soldiers.

As she examined the area with a her scopes, she felt the first drops of rain hit her on her skin. _Cool, for once the weatherman was right._ She quipped. _I really hope Snake doesn't take long getting here. I don't mind the mud but… this place is already a swamp as it is!_

She found a decent sniping nest that gave her a clear view of pretty much every nook and corner of the mine and set up her camp. She lay some large leaves from a nearby tree on the ground, so she wouldn't need to lay straight on the muddy rocks and took some more that she used as camouflage, placing them over her body. As much as the rain was a welcome event, she wouldn't want to risk soaking up in water. Even with rain water, too much would have suffocated her.

And then, she waited. And as her mind wandered, she started "singing" that tune that got stuck in her head so long before that she couldn't really identify it.

"Oh, so you're ready!" said Snake through the radio. "Good, I'm coming."

 _How does he know I'm ready?_

"You know, when you're idling around you mumble that tune. Like you're bored or something. I like it, but it's a bit repetitive… if you could expand the melody, I'd appreciate it a lot."

 _Oh now you make demands about me singing?_

"I really like your voice…"

That struck her, like a rock aimed at her head. How could he like her voice if she had never spoken a word to him? Or to anyone on Mother Base, to be fair. She grunted. _Snake, you're an idiot. Stick to your cassettes._

"Or I could simply stick with the latest hits. Damn, I'm dead to the world for nine years and suddenly they revolution the way they make music. All those strange sounds… Is David Bowie still around?"

She mumbled an affirmative reply. _You should hear the song he made with Queen. Or the other way around. Anyway… awesome!_

"I'll ask Ocelot to find some tapes or vinyls. Whatever. Oh, speak of the devil…" Through the radio she heard a faint melody in the distance, followed the mechanical noises of a tape recorder being operated. "Uh, Spandau Ballet. Hell this guy's handwriting sucks! Anyway… does it meet your tastes?"

 _I prefer Duran Duran._

"I'll take it as a yes."

He came out of the barracks and she spotted him when he poked his head around the corner. The rain was now falling steadily and they were both soaked to the bone. He nimbly dodged a couple of guards and took care of another one when he had decided to take a leak in the least favorable moment.

"Fuck, ages ago I shot a guy in the dick with a tranq rifle. I have no idea if he fell unconscious for the dart or for the pain," he commented as he hid the unconscious guy in a trash container.

 _The pain. Seriously, those darts sting a lot._

Then he fell. He slipped on the mud, his boots lost their grip on a slippery slope and he slid two or three meters ahead on his ass. "Oh for fuck's sake…" he snapped as he stood again. "Don't tell Miller."

Quiet laughed, loud. _Me? Tell him? Even if I talked, that guy would never want to be in the same room with me, how could I tell him!_

Through the scope on her gun, she observed as he tried to wipe away some of the mud from his fatigues and weapons. "Let's get this over with."

He finally found the cave. Rifle in hand, he ventured inside and disappeared from her view. She kept her eyes focused on the entrance of said cave.

It seemed like a normal exploration of a closed area, but it turned out to be so much more.

"Kaz, what the hell did the client tell you?" came through the earpiece of her radio. He had patched her through the channel that kept only him connected with Mother Base.

Miller sounded flustered when he replied. "What? What's going on?"

"Kids, Kaz, that's what's going on! The client wants me to kill children!"

 _Child soldiers?_ She thought.

"Boss, I had no idea!"

"Well, what do I do? I can't leave them here, they'll kill them one way or another!" snapped Snake.

"I don't know Boss… the client wants them dead but… they're just kids!" Miller sounded exasperated. "You can't leave them there, but where could they go?"

 _Mother Base!_ Quiet wanted to scream, yell and shout until her voice was hoarse. _There's room at Mother Base, they can be safe there!_ Despite her training as a ruthless assassin, she had always drawn the line on innocent women and children. They would never enter her scope, she would never accept jobs that required to kill children and unharmed women. Now this...

"We have no options," growled Snake. "Outer Heaven it is…"

Then, through the radio, she heard the deafening burst of an automatic rifle being unloaded. Then, complete silence.

Beneath her leafy, makeshift ghillie suit, Quiet shuddered in horror and shock. _You bastard son of a bitch!_

* * *

 _I have always wondered, ever since I played this mission, what were Quiet's thoughts as the cutscene rolled on and she couldn't see what was going on, only hear what Snake and Kaz could say. Here's my take on her POV. Hope you liked it!_


	6. Chapter 6

Quiet grunted in frustration as she kept her rifle trained on entrance of the cave, dead set on taking Big Boss down with a sleeping dart to the neck and then a .45 bullet to the head.

 _I swear to God you're not getting out of this mine alive, asshole._ She thought, bitterly. _Killing children… you crossed the line son of a bitch._

She drew a long breath and held it, moving muscles she didn't need anymore and straining the burnt tissue of her lungs and bronchi. It hurt a little, but she was so furious she barely registered it, as she waited for the right moment.

 _Come on, get out of there you bastard…_

At some point, during the seemingly eternal wait, she found herself contemplating how quickly one single decision could make her change opinion on someone. She had never thought Snake could be one to kill children, but apparently, that was a line he was apparently ready to cross, while she had always set her foot down on killing innocent bystanders. No innocent women, no children. Not even child soldiers.

The fact she had been cut off all radio comms, even the always open two-way line she had with Snake alone, made her even more furious. What were he and that other idiot Miller plotting? Was he taking pictures with the iDroid for the client?

 _Oh for fuck's sake get out of there!_

Her wish was granted. She noticed some movement at the entrance of the cave, a couple of minutes after the burst of bullets. Between the rain and the awful light, she could barely see, but someone was definitely moving around the threshold. Expecting Snake to appear sooner or later, she tensed, finger curved around the slippery trigger ready to shoot.

Then the lithe body of a child appeared in her scope. He was a short, scrawny creature dressed in rags scavenged here and there, his face a mask of fear and uncertainty as he walked out of the cave, followed by a second child, apparently of the same age, then a third and a fourth, until Snake finally walked out, carrying a kid over his shoulders.

Sighing in relief, she let go of the gun with a jerk and turned on her back and lay there, staring at the cloudy sky. She couldn't believe she had been so quick to judge something she couldn't see and was easily misunderstanded. Often, Snake and Miller spoke in their own terms, referring to things only they knew from their past experiences together, stuff she was unaware of. It was like they spoke in a different language, like when her grandmother taught her Navajo so they could speak together without being heard around by other people.

What a mistake she had made.

She was wiping the rain from her eyes, pushing her soaked hair back away from her forehead, when the radio channel was opened again. "Quiet, you alright?"

She mumbled something affirmative, as she turned again and gathered the rifle in her hands.

"Great," he replied. "We need to get going, fast. These kids won't make it far on their own, and like hell I'm going to kill children. I already informed Pequod of the added weight, he's on his way to the landing zone. We need to make our way there fast and unseen, you understand?"

Another affirmative mumble and a quick sniffle. For some reason she was crying, not sure if they were tears of relief for his words or the fact that she hadn't misjudged him so badly.

"There's a canyon, north east of here. It takes us straight out of the area and to the LZ, but it's probably heavily guarded. Care to take a look around?"

She was ready to do more than that. She cloaked and quickly surveyed the area. Snake was right, there were quite a big number of guards. She considered her options. It was dark, rain was pouring and the wind moved the fronds of the trees masking the noises of each step everyone took. She could find an appropriate nest and snipe them all down, putting them down for the nap of their lives. If only they didn't have that huge spotlight lighting the area.

Or, she could put out every each of them from close up, but that would draw even more suspects.

No, there were kids to be kept safe, Snake couldn't possibly keep them all safe and calm while traversing an hostile zone not knowing how to communicate with them.

Then, an idea. If she took the spotlight out of the equation, odds would significantly get better for them. If they couldn't see and couldn't turn back on their only source of light in the whole area, they couldn't possibly notice Snake and the children as they snuck away to safety.

The only way to obtain such result was to put a bullet or two inside the generator that fed electricity to the huge light. Her sidearm would do, if only she had a sound suppressor. She couldn't use the one attached to her rifle, it wouldn't fit the bore of the gun, the caliber was way too different. Maybe Snake's?

Quiet did something she had never done. She sped towards Snake and crept behind him. Before he could react to her presence behind him, she pulled his gun from his thigh holster and started unscrewing the sound suppressor. In the dim light, she could see the horror and the fear in his eye as he finally faced her. Was he thinking she was going to shoot him?

Probably yes.

Instead, she took the suppressor and handed him the gun back, then screwed the black cylinder on her own weapon. They were at the mouth of the canyon in that moment, she could see in the distance the generator, her target. Right in front of him, just to ensure him that she wasn't going to kill him, she took aim and shoot three bullets in rapid succession to the bulky unit.

Despite the effectiveness of the suppressor, the noise couldn't be completely masked like in the movies, and the kids whelped in fear. She had kept away from the target, in order to avoid being seen but most of all heard. Even with the device, the noise of a gun was very well recognizable by trained soldiers.

The moment the spotlight went off, she unscrewed the silencer and handed it back to him, then she cloaked once again and from a higher position, took the guards down, one by one.

"Quiet, this is the greatest idea you ever had," said Snake as he ushered the kids towards safety.

She smiled, briefly, as she dropped another guard down. Ten soldiers in total, eight went down in a minute, two more required some careful timing as the poor light and the rain made it hard to take a good shot at them. In the end, when she just couldn't wait anymore for a clean shot to the neck, where the sleeping dart was more effective, she simply shoot three darts each, all to the torso, and waited for them to go down.

It didn't take long, and as they fell squarely on their back in the tall, wet grass, she heard the whooping noise of the incoming helicopter. She was closer to the LZ than she imagined.

When the two soldiers hit the ground, the iDroid strapped to her utility belt happily chirped that the area was now clear. Snake, who had surely received the same message, hurried the children down the canyon.

One quick last check and the moment she was sure no one would come to check the broken generator and no one had noticed the children had escaped, she climbed down from her perch and joined Snake to help him with their new little friends.

As she did so though, she didn't expect to be completely overcome by a sudden surge of anger. How the fuck could he even think of cutting her out after he had fired, seemingly on a bunch of unharmed children?

With a jerk, she hoisted her rifle on her shoulder and jabbed him in the bicep as they walked.

With a wince, he startled, making the wounded children he carried cry in pain. "Ouch Quiet!" he exclaimed. "Why the hell did you do that?"

She wrapped her hand around the muzzle of the assault rifle that hanged from his hip and jerked it around to indicate the shooting at the kids, or at least what she had thought had happened, then she pointed at her in-ear monitor and made the international gesture for _I haven't heard shit after you shot, asshole_. Well, the _asshole_ part wasn't part of the gesture, but she really hoped her face would convey the insult.

"Wait you thought I had shot them?" She nodded, vehemently. "Jesus Christ Quiet! For what kind of monster have you taken me? Goddamit no! I would never even think of harming children, let alone shoot them in cold blood!"

Grunting, she jabbed him again in the arm, but not hard enough to hurt the child he was carrying. His leg was roughly bandaged with scraps of cloth, and he looked like he was in terrible pain.

 _Well next time don't cut me out of radio comm!_

"Fuck it, you really thought I could kill them?" She shrugged and he shook his head. "I'm gonna kill Kaz."

 _Wait, what?_

"He was the one that cut you out after I shot. We had a client that wanted the audio proof that I had killed them, so I gave him that. I have no fucking idea why Kaz cut you out, after I shot them, we talked about a plan to get them to safety. And you thought I had killed them… I'm lucky I don't have a .45 in my brain now!"

 _Fuck yes you're lucky!_ She thought. _I already had a plan to take you down and be done with you._

"Well, I'm glad you didn't kill me."

They had reached the landing zone and Pequod was already hovering above it, shooting rain drops in every direction at very high speed. He lowered the helicopter and Snake opened the side door and pulled himself up inside the cargo hold, then laid the wounded kid on the bench he usually occupied. "Help them up!"

She did as told, hoisting the children in the tank. They climbed up by themselves, with some help from Snake, and silently took a seat from those available. When they were done, Snake sat in his customary place when they took off or approached the landing zone, ready to defend the helicopter with the gatling guns, and she jumped on the railings just as Pequod set off. They both watched as the barely lit mine became smaller and smaller, until they couldn't see it anymore, hidden in the mountains and the thick vegetation of Central Africa. When the altitude became too much and the wind and rain rendered their perched positions too unstable, they pulled themselves inside the hold and he closed the door with a loud thud.

They were all soaked to the bone and the metallic floor was slippery, so much that as Quiet moved to take her customary seat, she slid on the shiny surface.

But instead of ruinously fall on her ass with a gasp of pain, the only ache she experienced was the one caused by Snake's bionic fingers tightly wrapped around her arm, one last attempt to keep her upright. Their eyes met just as the hold was lit by a lightning that cracked the sky outside.

Quiet felt a lump forming in her throat as his one eye bore into hers, like a surgical scalpel cut through the skin. She felt as if he was reading in her soul, decoding her deepest dreams and fears she kept so well hidden she didn't know them anymore. If she could have breathed actual oxygen, she was sure she'd have actual difficulties taking in air in that moment.

"It was a long night, Quiet, sit down and rest. I'll take care of the children."

She observed him as he quickly checked them all, on by one. He controlled everyone of them, if they were hurt or anything like that. He took good care of giving them something to eat, producing spare rations from a hidden compartment beneath the floor, and warm, clean clothes to ward off the chill of the rain. After everyone got something to chew on and a bowl of those things that heated instantly through a chemical reaction, bland tea from the smell, Snake sat on the floor of the helicopter, his back against Pequod's seat, tightly wrapped in a warm woolen blanket.

She really wished she could have a blanket for herself too. The helo wasn't heated and she was soaked with cold rainwater. Her boots were soggy and scraped the skin of her feet, the bikini and fishnet tights she was forced to wear to provide a modicum of modesty did nothing to dispel the cold sensation that pervaded her.

She shivered, visibly.

Snake must have caught that movement. "You cold?" She nodded. He stretched his right arm towards her, gripping a tail of the blanket with his fingers. "Come here."

 _Idiot, I can't get covered!_

"Only your back and shoulders. Some body heat will do you good, just until you feel a little better. Come on, I don't bite."

She considered it. He was right, some body heat wouldn't hurt her. And if she kept her legs and most of her arms out in open air, she might as well don't feel the difference. She might get drowsy, that was quite sure, but she wouldn't die of asphyxiation.

But was it suitable? After all, she was his prisoner, what would his subjects think, if they found out he had _cuddled_ with a prisoner? Sure, it was only a one off thing, something that would never happen again in normal circumstances, and yet? What about his reputation?

As if reading her mind, Pequod turned towards her. "I won't tell people if you don't."

In the end, the need for warmth won over her attempts to preserve his reputation among his men. And sure he was warm. He made sure the blanket covered only her shoulders and parts of her back, her legs, arms and majority of her torso was free to let her breathe comfortably. Her intake of oxygen was a little reduced still, and coupled with the efforts and the very strong emotions of the night, she did indeed feel drowsy. She tried to fight it for a long time, but lulled by the steady, rhythmic noise of the engine and the rotors above them, everyone had fallen asleep, Snake included.

It was a futile battle she fought strenuously, but weariness won. She fell asleep too, and slept fitfully until Pequod called them loud through the intercom to warn them they were nearly home.

The moment Quiet and Snake realized she had been sleeping with her head on his shoulder, they laughed.


End file.
